Ground-Track Gamma-Ray Prospecting (2D)

Real mission planners rarely watch a rotating 3D globe — they plan orbital surveys on flat ground-track charts, an equirectangular longitude–latitude plot with the spacecraft's sub-satellite point traced out as a sine wave. This 2D companion to the orbital gamma-ray prospecting simulator recomputes the same underlying physics — orbital ground-track mechanics, an inverse-square count rate, and Poisson-noisy photon counting — directly in that flat projection, and makes visible an effect the 3D globe view hides: because meridians converge at the poles, a footprint of constant true angular size on the sphere stretches wider in longitude the closer the ground track gets to the poles. Altitude and collimator field of view set footprint size and signal strength, inclination sets how far toward the poles the ground track reaches, and the live count rate, footprint extent, coverage and RMS map error track the same resolution-vs-signal-to-noise trade every real orbital spectrometer mission has to budget for.